Weather holding, off at Clapham Junction again to pick up a Bullingdon from Grant Road, from where to Battersea Park to do a circumnavigation of the Peace Pagoda there, an impressive place, not least because it is always smart and clean. I have often wondered how this can be, but reading about the Pagoda at http://www.batterseapark.org/history/peace-pagoda/, the answer appears to be that the priests and volunteers have to work at it. I liked the story about how it was inspired by something similar at Milton Keynes of all places. Also how granting permission to build it was the very last act of the GLC before it was abolished by the great thatcher, now in the sky.
On to one of the last few slots in Smith Square, nicely in time for a 1300 start. Rather more impressed by the interior than I was on my last visit (see 4th July 2013), and I liked the way the large, mainly plain pillars framed the stage. Performance good, and as on the last visit, the piano did not try to outplay the strings; a restrained rendering which I liked. The Ensemble don't appear to have a website but they do facebook and they do tweet, and from the former I found my way to what sounded like a spirited rendering of the Brahms Piano Quartet Op. 25 which kept me busy last year, and was, as it happens, the reason for my last visit to St. John's. Their next big outing looks to be a festival in and around Oswestry in early May.
Next stop the 'Marquis of Granby' in Romney Street, a decent establishment, but one which I do not remember visiting more than once or twice when I served the nearby Home Office. A fine place to ruminate on the virtues or otherwise of seeing 24 lectures by Heffernan on J. Joyce on Ulysses on DVD rather than on the flesh. I am tempted, with lectures on DVD being quite the thing these days, but the reviews are a bit mixed and the price is a bit fierce for something which might wind up getting recycled before it was watched. The matter remains under review. From there another Bullingdon to St Martin's Street, from where it was just a stroll to Old Compton Street where I could sample the sausage sandwiches, German style, at Herman's (http://www.herman-ze-german.co.uk/). Grub not bad and I liked the various mincers decorating the wall, one of them very like my own Spong No. 10. And then, it being too good an opportunity to miss, a visit to Gerry's to get a bottle of the Eustacian liqueur known as Jagermeister (see 2nd January). Yet to be sampled.
And so home to potato pie, a warming standby for a cold winter's evening.
PS: thinking of the abolition of the GLC, I imagine that the 33 London Boroughs would manfully resist giving any of their powers back to any reinvented GLC, now that they have got used to them. Although that said, I am not sure how many powers the GLC had left by the time that it was abolished. I recall talk of it being more a funny sort of bank which happened to run fire engines than a local authority.
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